July 2000
Category: Adventure, Action, Friendship, DARK DARK ANGST
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Not mine, just playing with them not seeking to make any sort
of
money. ((Except for Shelby and Penny.. they're mine. :> ))
Pairings: Those established in my timeline (Companions of Fate) this is
just Duo and Quatre out and about at the moment.
NOTES: As I've said before 4th Colony in L2 is NOT A NICE PLACE!! This part in particular is very dark and rather wicked. It also brushes across Non-Consensual flashbacks. Please do not read if such upsets or squicks you. I'm not here to traumatize anyone but this part doesn't pull any punches. The good news is this is the last part where I'll be hitting you with a double whammie. Still.. please please PLEASE BE WARNED and read with Caution!!
Quatre couldn't quite remember how he'd gotten them both up onto one of the small beds. His entire focus was on the boy he held close to his chest. Duo had finally worn himself out. Between hard, silent tears and stumbling stories, exercised memories, Quatre wasn't surprised that the other boy now snored softly. He'd wanted to get up and get Duo some water a couple of times but each time he'd made to move away, the American had gripped him all the tighter, watching him with wild violet eyes as if he expected Quatre to run out on him.
Duo had spoken of his earliest memories of the streets, then his tale had jumped around, it had been like listening to a slide show with no coherent pattern. He'd be talking about one thing, then say something that made him remember something else and he'd start talking about that. The one thing Duo had not spoken of, was the Alpha and those memories. Somehow, the braided boy could not bring himself to speak of that to the Arabian. In that small way the braided boy still wanted to protect his *little brother*.
For now, only snores came from the American and Quatre could feel his aching kidneys bugging him for a trip to the bathroom. Moving very very carefully, he slid out from beneath Duo, curling the boy around a pillow warmed by his body. Duo frowned and murmured restlessly, causing Quatre to lean over him, stroking back long chestnut threads of hair that had escaped the confines of the braid.
"Sshhhhsss. It's all right." Quatre whispered as he gentled Duo, not moving further from the bed till the other boy had calmed.
Slipping out the door and down the hall, Quatre stepped into the community restroom. Wincing as he felt internal muscles protest the simple act of reliving himself he quietly thanked Allah he didn't have to deal with blood where blood shouldn't be. Leaning his forearm against the wall and his head against his forearm he had just closed his eyes when someone cleared their throat.
"Ah..Hrm."
Quatre's strung out reflexes reacted before he thought about it, which was how he came to be standing there, gun in one hand...himself in the other. The young man standing in the doorway watched him with a sort of wary amusement.
With an air of 'Yes, I always go to the bathroom with a gun in one hand,' Quatre calmly holstered the weapon and finished his business. Turning to wash his hands, he addressed the young man who still stood silent in the doorway.
"Um.. yes then?"
"I've got a note for Maxwell's companion. That you?"
"Yes." Quatre turned to face the young man, brushing his hands along his jeans.
"Right then... here." The teenager thrust the crumpled paper towards Quatre but didn't come any closer to him.
Quatre crossed to the doorway and took the damp note. The young man slouched off down the hallway, leaving Quatre to read in peace.
~/if you want to hear something to your advantage, meet me in the warehouse at 5th and lake, the safety of the orphanage may depend on it. and leave the braided baka behind.\~
It was unsigned but the words 'braided baka' and the handwriting were familiar. It was then that Shelby's words from earlier slammed home...
//"Vice Minister Dorlain is here..."//
And an earlier conversation with Duo followed quickly on it's heels.
//"Duo.. how are we going to get past Heero??"//
//" He's busy.. something with Relena."//
Quatre closed the note in his small fist and looked up at the cracked walls of the bathroom. Heero Yuy was on the 4th.
After making another check on Duo, Quatre headed down the stairs into the kitchen. Shelby sat at the small table, going over accounts and drinking a cup of coffee. She looked up as Quatre entered and her pretty eyes widened as she took a look at his bruised face.
"Wha.."
Quatre quickly motioned her off the subject. "Shelby? I've got to go out. Duo's resting quietly but..."
She watched him with tired but knowing eyes and nodded. "Don't worry, I'll go sit with him."
Quatre smiled, a slightly lopsided affair and closed his small fingers on Shelby's shoulder before slipping out the door. He slide through shadows and muck he didn't wish to identify as he flitted through the streets silently. Keeping away from the roaming gangs of street enforcers and from the separate drugger gangs as he made a twisted, turning, backtracking, winding path to the warehouse.
Approaching it, he eyeballed the doors but some of the natural caution of the 4th had begun to wear off on him and he found the most inaccessible window to wriggle through instead. The warehouse was pitch black and empty. There were a few crates stacked around, and one high window where the artificial colony moonlight could enter, leaving a patch of soft light in a pattern of squares on the floor.
Quatre pulled his weapon out of it's holster and began to move through the crates. Hoping neatly to keep out of the light thrown on the floor as he let his dark accustom eyes search through the murkiness of the abandoned building. Something dropped silently behind him from above and a hand clamped over his hand on the gun with a grip like steel.
"Don't shoot me," Heero's voice said in his ear.
Heero spoke just in time to keep from getting a small pointy elbow in his ribcage. Quatre halted the motion of his arm, just barely bumping the other boy's torso as he wheeled around, pivoting around his clasped hand and looking to the other boy's face.
"You're lucky I didn't." He was tired, aching, nervy as hell and likely to shoot at rats if they looked at him funny.
"No." Heero said simply. "Put it away, the warehouse is empty except for you and me. Let's talk."
Quatre flicked the safety on and waited a moment till Heero released his hand before sliding the gun back into the shoulder holster under his duster. Then he leaned back against a crate, looking at Heero. There were things he wanted to say to the other boy but at the moment, he couldn't even begin to think how to broach the subjects, so he waited.
Heero, was clad in his tradition spandex shorts, with a dark long sleeved jacket over the tank top, sat on a crate. "You look like shit," he said. If Quatre didn't know better, he might have suspected that more light might have exposed something like slight amusement in the Prussian blue eyes. In the dark he could reassure himself that this was unlikely.
"Yeah, well Duo's got a wicked right.. and a devastating left and I never realized he had steel in the toes of his boots." The last said in an airy almost thoughtful tone.
"I guess you need to spend more time practicing with Wufei," Heero returned.
The frustration and the despair of the colony had taken their toll and Quatre barely stopped himself from exploding at Heero in much the same manner as Duo had blown up earlier in the night. Instead he just closed his eyes, concentrating on getting the throb in his cheek to abate. "You said you had information?"
"Sure," Heero said. "I was going to tell you to try and avoid Duo's left, his right, and especially watch out for the boots." This was delivered deadpan. Eventually Quatre was going to remember that he had once been afraid of Heero's reaction to his joining this expedition. "Quatre... the information was just that I know you are both here, and I'm watching you. I wanted you to know you had backup."
It would sink in, eventually but Quatre was still very caught up in the facade of FC. That part of him, pulled from his psyche that had allowed the Zero system to get it's first hold on him. The small part of him that was the calculating killer. The part that didn't *fear* not because of some belief in dying for the good cause but because *fear* wasn't in his nature. For now, though he listened to Heero and nodded. "All right, that will keep us all from tripping over each other in the confusion."
Heero mentally shook his head. "Quatre. Snap out of it. You and Duo are in way over your heads. You are going to need help."
Quatre flared a little. "Don't you think I know that?! I've been trying to get the idea through Duo's head that we cannot make everything better by fighting here with guns. That for every person we kill or *remove* someone is ready to take their place, no matter how high up the food chain. The fight here is beyond the physical."
Heero shrugged. "Yes I think you know that. That's why I'm talking to you and not that braided baka. As far as removing people... that's not really the problem. I can remove all the people you want removed. The problem here is Duo."
Quatre had always made himself look beyond the shrugs and deadpan reactions and seemingly icy responses in Heero. Knowing it was the other boy's way and respecting that barrier in him. Tonight though it just rubbed on already raw nerves. His teeth snapped together as he bit back his first response, instead focusing on Duo.
"Yes. There are a lot of issues that Duo needs to face and he's not happy about them." Quatre fell back against the crate he was leaning near and crossed his arms over his chest. The motion defensive.
"He doesn't need to be happy. He's doing what he needs to do. What you need to do is try and stay out of his way. And relax a little. You won't be any good to him in this state," Heero said flatly.
The small, not quite so blonde, felt like screaming. There were so many things he wanted to say back at Heero but he quashed them all as useless uses of air. Heero hopped down and went over to the little brunette? Without pausing, he simply put his arms around Quatre and pulled him against Heero's chest in probably the millennium's most unexpected hug.
It served to shock the small Arabian into sense. He was so utterly floored every taint of the place, of the colony and it's self serving people, of the suffering of strangers and of his best friend everything that had begun to weave the brittle shell around him just shattered like weak glass and fell around his feet. He just stood there for a moment completely stunned.
"That's better," Heero said quietly, not removing his arms. "Let's try this again. 'I'm here to tell you, you have backup'." Heero added, "That means you, Quatre, have backup, even in dealing with that beautiful idiot named Duo."
Quatre nodded his head where is rested against Heero's shoulder. His voice back to it's usual sweet tones, not the hard bitter edge it had earlier. "I understand. I think he's thrown the worst of it tonight. It... was a bad scene." Quatre meant more the anguish that had finally escaped the braided boy then anything Duo might have done to him physically.
"I'm sorry you had to deal with it," Heero said calmly. "I thank you for being here to deal with it. If I couldn't be..." only the return of Quatre's empathy could have revealed the underlying pain that was well hidden at those words, "Then I would have wanted it to be you. I wanted to be able to show him... but he didn't want me to know. So don't tell him. He has to work this through." Heero let out a breath that might have been a sigh if it hadn't been the Perfect Soldier doing it. He brushed Quatre's hair briefly and stepped back, his expression simply showing the same calm mask it had from the beginning of the conversation.
Quatre drifted back, wrapping his arms around himself and looking towards Heero with an expression of quiet concern for the other boy. As was more usual for him, wearing his heart on his sleeve instead of hidden behind the brittle shell. "He... I think it's you he wants to talk to Heero, he just doesn't know how to approach it. He's so... turned around inside right now he's lashing out in every direction but doesn't know how to channel it all. I think he wanted to spare you that."
Heero said very softly, "I didn't spare him." Then he lifted a shoulder slightly and dropped it. "I can't force it. I'm not any good at things like that. If he... decides in the end he wants to talk about it, I'll be there to listen. Until then... I'll do what I can to keep him safe from more than he can handle, and let him deal with the rest. He's not a child. None of us are. He can deal with whatever he has to. It might... do him some good."
The small Arabian rubbed surreptitiously at his sore ribs, " yes... but... I know this..." He stops and purses his lips, angry at himself for not finding the right words, taking a careful breath he begins again. "Running like he did, I know that he shouldn't have done it and he does as well. He's going to be expecting you to be angry at him or worse, hurt. If you can... just give him some time, he's going to desperately want to talk to you if you seem at all receptive..." Quatre stopped, frowned at himself again and pulled his hand away from his side to make a graceful gesture. "Don't yell at him right off the bat, he's expecting it and it's eating away at him."
Heero's wonderful eyebrows drew together. "Then he *is* an idiot," he said, and Quatre could now detect the pain masked by the forbidding tone. Then quietly. "Think about it, Quatre. I've *never* yelled at him. Ever. Or any of you."
He drew in another breath and released it, then turned to go. "I'll be around... if you need me."
Quatre spoke softly, "Heero... he's expecting you to be hurt, because that's how he'd feel if the situation were reversed. He's running on pure unadulterated emotion right now. The only logical moves I've seen come out of him come from subconscious kinetic memory tied to his training. The moment he let's himself *think*... it's like riding a rollercoaster. He does need you, he will need you when this slows down. When he slows down."
Heero only paused, did not turn back around. "I'm glad you understand him so well. So do I. And maybe someday he'll understand me. That I need him as much as... as you say he's going to need me. That I want to be the one he turns to when he needs comfort or when he needs help. But none of that matters, Quatre. I'll be here. Forever, if it takes that long. There are a lot of things I'm not good at. Like saying the right words. But I know how to wait."
Then Heero turned, walked into the deeper shadows and was gone.
End Part 8
(( I didn't want to spoil the surprise of Heero showing up so. Added NOTE: Bonne is the wonderful voice of Heero in this part, all positive comments about Heero should be directed towards her please! :D Laekin. ))
Laekin
Please send comments to: seregill@aol.com or bonnejeanne@yahoo.com.